Market, Muck Can Keep County Raising Cane

Muck, the rich black soil that is composed of rotting plants and has made Palm Beach County the heart of America`s sugar industry, is slowly but surely disappearing.

By 1990, major efforts to preserve muck -- including possible legal limits on growing sugar cane -- should be put into effect, a high-ranking state official says.

The sugar industry, which produces some $480 million worth of sugar cane in Palm Beach County each year, responds that it has done as good a job as can be done to preserve the organically rich muck.

``The muck resources are a very valuable resource of the state,`` said Elton Gissendanner, head of the Florida Department of Natural Resources.

``There ought to be a policy to make sure (the resources) don`t disappear in a generation or two. When the muck gets to a certain depth, you probably ought to stop farming it,`` Gissendanner said. ``It`s coal on top of the ground.``

Muck is made up of the 5,000-year-old remains of dead plants -- the same material that under other conditions forms into coal or oil. Once gone, it would take thousands of years to form again.

Eighty percent of Florida`s muck -- and its sugar cane -- is in Palm Beach County, and Florida`s sugar crop is the largest in the land, said Dalton Yancey, executive director of the Florida Sugar Cane League.

The muck area was drained by settlers around the turn of the century to make way for farming and development. Once that happened, the muck began to disappear, soil scientists said.

The process, known as subsidence, affects all organic soils and was noted as early as the 1600s in England, said George Snyder of the state-run Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences office in Belle Glade.

``Whether or not the land is farmed doesn`t affect subsidence,`` Snyder said. ``The important factor is whether it is drained. (By draining muckland) you`re essentially pumping the oil out of the ground. Without farming, you`re letting it run off without using it.``

Yancey said soil scientists predicted in the 1950s that muck would be gone by now, but conservation techniques have preserved it. In coming years, new farming methods should further control subsidence, he said.

About a decade ago, IFAS agriculture experts in Belle Glade came up with dozens of possible ways to stem subsidence, but most of them have yet to be tested, said Joseph Orsenigo, a former IFAS staffer now working with the sugar cane league.

But a wholesale prohibition against farming in shallow muck, as Gissendanner suggested, is too drastic, Orsenigo argued.

``This thing, it seems to me, has got to be thought through rather than coming out with a glib statement,`` Orsenigo said.